Do you know what yesterday, today and tomorrow have in common? Statistically speaking, they are the hottest days of the year, averaging 85 for a high and 70 for a low. In that sense the recent hot spell peaked just about on time. Although the heat advisory is still in effect, today shouldn't be as warm as the weekend as the temperature will probably top out around 90. There's a slight chance of showers and......

Hot enough for ya? The NY Times has a cheap, easy solution for cooling off: the heat wave haircut! The paper calls summer "scalping season" and says that barbershops have been flooded as the temperatures have been rising -- with men shaving off their entire head of hair, beards included. They say "half measures are no longer sufficient" and the phrase "a little off the top" has gone out the window. One barber estimated that......

photograph by d_savage on Flickr Today is going to be downright unpleasant and tomorrow even worse. A big high pressure system off the Mid-Atlantic coast is pulling hot and humid air into the region. Look for highs this afternoon in the mid 90s in the city and lower 90s in the suburbs. The heat and humidity have set off a heat advisory as well as an air quality alert. In response to the heat......

The NYC Medical Examiner's office says six residents died from the heat wave which saw temperatures soar to record-breaking levels in high humidity. The victims all died of hyperthermia (aka heat stroke)-- 57-year-old man, 74-year-old woman, and 84-year-old man in Brooklyn; a 70-year-old woman, an 84-year-old woman, and an 89-year-old man in Queens--and five of them died on Tuesday, the hottest day, in their homes. (Back in 2006, there were 20-23 heat wave-related deaths.) The......

The heat is on all across the Eastern Seaboard, and temperatures in New York City reached 96 degrees yesterday (just missing a record)--and it felt like even more with its densely-packed buildings and people. There were scattered power outages: Outages for 1,400 customers were reported by Con Ed, 788 by Long Island Power Authority (which had thousands on Monday), and 75,700 by PSE&G; in NJ's Essex County. ...

Bring on the baked Big Apple references, because the "heat advisory" for Bronx, Kings, New York, Queens, Richmond Counties remains in effect until 6 p.m. tonight. Another one will go into effect tomorrow between 1 p.m. and 6 p.m. The heat wave is expected to last a few days, and Con Ed claims it can meet the extra electricity demand, but a spokesman adds, "Nevertheless, power problems can occur...We'll work very quickly to get them......

Enjoy the cool weather today as tomorrow is likely to be twenty degrees warmer. The fog and clouds this morning are typical precursors to the passage of a warm front. This particular front has some mighty hot air behind it. Today's high will be in the mid-70s. The sun may make an appearance after noon. Tomorrow is going to be hot. Look for a near-record high in the mid 90s. The heat is expected to......

Bar Boulud: Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni recently lost his patience waiting on hold for 15 minutes to make a reservation, which should give you some sense of how feverish the excitement is for Daniel Boulud’s latest foray. The tony uptown wine bar, across the street from Lincoln Center, enjoyed the raging buzz of a sneak-preview opening on New Year’s Eve and now the 100 seat restaurant is open for real. Judging from the photos,......

READING: Dave Eggers has delivered two (out of three) great novels, and tonight he reads from last one (which is just out on paperback), What is the What. He'll be at the Strand discussing the book and he'll also give a slideshow presentation from a recent trip he took to Sudan. More info here. Friday // 7pm // Strand Bookstore [828 Broadway] // Free EVENT: We love a good pillow fight, and tonight there's a......

Happy first weekend of September - and happy Labor Day weekend, too, for our American cities! Let's take a look at what's been happening around the Ist-a-verse. The deaths of two firefighters shook Bostonist this week. Boston's firefighters bent over backwards all week long - first, they fought flames pouring from the Boston Tea Party museum, and then a restaurant fire killed two and injured many more. Their efforts make everything else - like Tom......

There are a lot of obscure weather and climate statistics and records. Two of Gothamist's favorites are the record low high temperature and the record high low temperature. Yesterday we had one of the former. The combination of being in a cold air mass and under heavy cloud cover also tied 1911 (WCBS didn't give the exact date) as having the lowest high temperature of any day in August. More fun facts! The high was......

This afternoon's temperature has been bouncing up and down as the sun struggles to come out behind the cruddy clouds. This morning's clouds were leftover from a bit of convective activity to our south last night. A line of showers is approaching the city from the west. Some of those showers may be intense, as they hit the city later this afternoon and into the evening. A high pressure system behind today's cold front will......

That wasn't much of a heat wave, was it? Two straight days with a high of 92 degrees barely rates mentioning. By comparision, the longest stretch of 90 degree days recorded in Central Park was 12 in 1953. More recently, in July and August 2002, there was a 22-day stretch in which the high reached at least 90 on 17 of those days. The extreme heat is mostly gone, but the humidity has increased, making......

Over the past few days the storm off the coast has been the Fugazi of weather systems. It's been doing its own thing, shooting spokes of clouds and rain over New York and New England, completely independent of the world of weather circulating around it. Over the next day or two, however, it appears that the low will get ambushed and be incorporated into the mainstream atmospheric circulation. Today's cooler weather is one sign......

With autumn in full swing and the weather continuing to cool, it’s easy to forget just how scorching and unbearably hot this last summer was at times. Between Starbucks’ quickly rescinded free drink offer and the multiple “cooling” centers set up around the city, the whole time seems like a convenient blur now. But Newsday reports that as the City continues to tally the death toll from the heat wave of 2006, the number is......

NY1 seems to have taken Labor Day off when it comes to today's weather. Ah, well, Gothamist will try to fill-in some of the blanks. Today will be a slightly warmer version of yesterday. In other words, nice enough to make up for Saturday's wetness. Look for mostly sunny skies and a high temperature approaching 80. Perfect for the West Indian Day parade! The pleasantness doesn't last too long as rain is expected to......

If there's a heat wave, it seems that is takes weeks to figure out who has died from it, as the city has raised the number of heat wave-related deaths to 36. Three more deaths caused by the heat wave earlier this month were confirmed by the ME's office: An 82 year old mother and her 47 year old son from Brooklyn and a 46 year old man in the Bronx. Between August 10 and......

The regulatory agency that oversees utilities in NY State, the Public Service Commission has been holding holding public hearings about the Queens blackout. The only thing is that the meetings have drawn very few attendees - those ones who did make it made sure to yell things like "This is a disgrace!" The NY Times reports that the hearings aren't providing any answers to angry and confused customers. Well, clearly the hearings are just the......

With the weather as perfect as it was last night, it’s pretty easy to forget about the excessive heat and humidity that consumed the country last week. But as the city’s medical examiners continue to perform autopsies on New Yorkers who died last week, we’re finding that the death count from the heat wave continues to climb with more than 10 deaths being added to the list since Friday. An 80-year-old Queens woman and a......

As we appreciate the fact that last week's heat wave was last week, the NY Times' Sewell Chan has an article about that the little-known fact that turned-off appliances that are still plugged-in still draw electricity. We mentioned the "standby mode" issue last week, noting that is why Con Ed asks people to actually unplug TVs, printers, computers, and the like when the power demand is high. (It probably isn't a bad idea to unplug......

Remember yesterday when we thought the body-count for last weeks heat wave was at 10-13 people? Yeah, scratch that. Coroners for the City are now upping that number by ten to 20-23 deaths. The three-body spread is due to suspicious looking circumstances which the coroner is looking at extra closely before blaming on the high temperatures (a man in his 30s found under the Gowanus Expressway and a 82-year-old woman and her 47-year-old son......

Well, the heat wave is past, the dead are being counted, and so it is now time for the city's papers to fill up their first-Saturday-in-August issues with newsprint on the aftermath and what could've gone worse. So let's just go with that old-blog-standard, the roundup: - Many (we'd guess most) West Queens residents who suffered through the eight-day blackout last month are not in the least amused by ConEd's offer of a $3......

With the recent heat wave broken the city has now begun the unenviable task of counting bodies. And the news isn't so swell: As many as 13 New Yorkers may have had their lives cut short by the recent oppressive heat, though as of this morning the City was keeping the count at 10. Six of the dead lived in Brooklyn and the other four lived in Manhattan. The victims ranged in age from......

Yesterday was the third day of the August heat wave, but the sprinkling of rain in the early evening and cooler weather today and the weekend should hopefully bring relief to us all. And it looks like Con Ed managed to avoid a bigger blackout when feeder cables on the East Side failed and manholes exploded in the area as well; of course, Con Ed sending its own non-essential employees home certainly freaked everyone......

With the mercury rising to high for the city's liking, Mayor Bloomberg held a press conference at the Office of Emergency Operations in Brooklyn to emphasize what the city is doing during the heat wave. We suspect he's trying to be extra visible and genially authoritative (check out the plaid shirt!) in order to salvage public opinion after the Queens blackout, but his words are important:“The heat wave affects New Yorkers in all five boroughs,......

It's pretty hot out there, eh? Actually, in Brooklyn it isn't too bad right now. At least if you can catch a breeze in the shade. Which is our way of leading into the sort of good news that as of yesterday afternoon (the first day of the heat wave we're just settling into) ConEd had only "only 139 customers without power — 93 in Queens, 22 in Westchester, 19 in Staten Island, 3......

- After another night with finicky to no power, the lights on Staten Island seem to be back on, but with this new heat wave the question is "for how long?" - One way to pitch in to prevent another round of massive power-outages is to try really hard to use as little power as possible: Turn off your AC and electronics when not at home, keep your thermostats no lower then 78, keep......

A very interesting NY Sun story about the future of the "Honest Boy" fruit stand at the southeast corner of Broadway and Houston. Many people, including Gothamist, love the stand for fresh fruit at all times ($2 for a container of delicious, refreshing watermelon!), and now, Honest Boy's owner Pan Gi Lee and the MTA are meeting with the Landmarks Preservation Commission to propose turning the old stand into a "two-story glass, steel, and aluminum......

Now that our mini-heat wave is over, tropical storm Beryl is making her presence felt. Sort of. Places along the shore from Brooklyn to Montauk may see some showers, possibly with intense rain, starting this morning. Beryl is forecast to skirt eastern Long Island before hitting Rhode Island and Cape Cod. Rain is forecast through tonight due to Beryl and through the weekend as the storm sucks Atlantic moisture, tomorrow and Saturday will be unpleasantly......

Even blogging has become unbearable in this weather thanks to the insane (and baffling) amount of heat coming out of our new goddamn laptop. In addition to some less often encountered consequences of scalding temperatures, Gothamist wants you, the reader, to stay cool during these tepid times and avoid more common ailments. The New York Times reported yesterday that 48 of our United States reported temperatures above 90 degrees. We also learned that Death Valley,......